The Cusp of War
As Russia Masses Troops at the Ukrainian Border, American Officials Ramp Up the Rhetoric
The Rutgers student center on College Ave is filled with the kind of easy patter that rises mid-semester. Students are comfortable with each other, have made connections, and their conversations mingle school work, music, personal relationships, and the fate of the school’s basketball team.
To my left, a guy sits and watches the Indiana-Northwestern women’s game — he changed TV channels on the big screen from the ever-present CNN to the Big Ten network, leaving behind the tired debate over Ukraine that has been droning on for weeks, offering a scene far different than the images from the Eastern European nation accompanying the CNN report.
I asked my community college students earlier in the day what they knew of Ukraine, and one said “something big is going on.” Not much more. The fact that we seem to be inching closer and closer to a hot war with Russia does not seem on their radar.
The New York Times reported Thursday on a “dramatic spike in shelling up and down the front line between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists,” which “raised fears that a conflict that until now has consisted almost entirely of saber-rattling may now offer Moscow the kind of pretext the United States says it is looking for to invade.”
And on Friday, President Joe Biden says he expects an invasion within days, that Russian President Vladimir Putin has made up his mind.
Ukraine’s government frames the conflict as an existential threat, while Russia claims its troop buildup derives from “its obligation to protect ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.”
For our part, American officials have fallen into a familiar rhetorical pattern, raising a Cold War-like alarm that has us potentially over-promising in our response.
The Biden administration warns of a Russian attack and has threatened sanctions, has promised that the “United States and our Allies and partners will respond decisively,” though American troops fighting in Ukraine is off the table for now.
For now. Gilbert Achbar, who teaches at the University of London, described the tensions earlier this month as beyond what we have seen in decades, reaching “a degree arguably not seen on the continent since the end of World War II.”
Putin and Biden, he writes, “are playing with fire,” and are failing to see that “events in such circumstances quickly acquire their own dynamics to the beat of the drums of war — dynamics that surpass the control of all individual actors and risk triggering an explosion that none of the players had originally intended.”
Already, what we can call the foreign policy establishment is ramping up the rhetoric. On Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris cast the crisis as “a decisive moment in history,” in which “the foundation of European security is under direct threat.” Harris essentially threatened an increase of NATO forces along Russia’s perimeter, a move more likely to inflame tensions than resolve the crisis.
This echoes what hawkish members of Congress have been saying over the last several weeks. In late January, for instance, a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members called on the Biden administration to act. The op-ed — written by Reps. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., Mike Quigley, D-Ill., and Andy Harris, R-Md. — does not directly call for sending American troops to Ukraine — but it cites the 1990 invasion of Iraq as a precedent, implying that a military solution should be on the table.
“Let us recall that in 1990, when Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein ordered his Republican Guard across the border into Kuwait, the United States led a United Nations-backed coalition to drive the invading troops back,”“With Putin eager to embark on a similar course, President Joe Biden should seek such a coalition. When liberty falls under siege, the world has an obligation to act.”
U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, also called for aggressive action. In a Fox News opinion piece, he compared the current crisis in Ukraine to the interwar years and the rise of Germany and its expansionist designs. America was wrong to recede from the world stage after World War I, he says, but was correct to engage during World War II (he ignores that the United States waited until it was attacked, two years after the war began in Europe).
“America,” he writes, “must once again choose engagement. We must once again draw a hard line against Russian expansion. This time, to prevent Ukraine from becoming the first domino in a potential resurgence of the Soviet Union.”
This distorts both the history of the 20th Century and ascribes motives to Putin in line with the Cold War and not so much with the world as it exists today. Russia’s actions are an act of intimidation, and an invasion would violate Ukraine’s sovereignty. But the picture of Putin and the crisis is painted with Cold War hyperbole, as have all of our relations with Putin — which is why it’s no accident that NATO expansion has been at the center of current diplomacy, both for us and for the Russians.
I am trying to remain hopeful that we can avoid war with Russia, but the rhetoric is increasingly moving away from a diplomatic solution, away from peace and toward an outcome that will result in thousands of deaths, thousands more injured or made into refugees. And as our politicians continue to fight the Cold War, too many of us are silent, disengaged. We seem to be sleepwalking toward war.